Shantaram (103 page)

"For fuck's sake!" I hissed. "You scared the fuckin' shit outta me! Don't do that shit, Habib!"

"It's okay, it's okay," Mahmoud Melbaaf said, stepping up beside the madman.

Habib garbled something at me, speaking so quickly that I couldn't make out a single clear syllable. His eyes were starting from his head. The effect was exaggerated by the dark, heavy pouches beneath his eyes, which dragged the lower lids with them and showed too much white below the fractured, scattered wheel of the iris.

"What?"

"It's okay," Mahmoud repeated. "He wants to talk with everybody.

He talks to every man, tonight. He comes to me. He asks me to make it English for you, what he says. You are the last, before Khaled. He wants to speak to Khaled last."

"What did he say?"

Mahmoud asked him to repeat what he'd said to me. Habib did speak again, in exactly the same too-rapid, hyper-energetic manner, staring into my eyes as if he expected an enemy or a monstrous beast to emerge from them. I was just as steadfast in returning the stare: I'd been locked up with violent, crazy men, and I knew better than to take my eyes off him.

"He says that strong men make the luck to happen," Mahmoud translated for us.

"What?"

"Strong men, they make it for itself, the luck."

"Strong men make their own luck? Is that what he means?"

"Yes, exactly so," Mahmoud agreed. "A strong man can make his own luck."

"What does he mean?"

"I do not know," Mahmoud replied, smiling patiently. "He just says it."

"He's just going around, telling everybody this?" I asked. "That a strong man makes his own luck?"

"No. For me, he said that the Prophet, peace be upon Him, was a great soldier before he was a great teacher. For Jalalaad, he said that the stars shine because they are full with secrets. It is different for every man. And he was in too much a hurry for telling us these things. It is very important for him. I do not understand, Lin. I think it is because we fight tomorrow morning."

"Was there anything else?" I asked, mystified by the exchange.

Mahmoud asked Habib if there was anything else that he wanted to say. Holding the stare into my eyes, Habib rattled away in Pashto and Farsi.

"He says only that there is no such a thing as luck. He wants you to believe him. He says again that a strong man-"

"Makes his own luck," I completed the translation for him. "Well, tell him I appreciate the message."

Mahmoud spoke, and for a few moments Habib stared harder, searching in my eyes for a recognition or response that I couldn't give him. He turned and loped away with the stooped, crouching run that I found more chilling and alarming, somehow, than the more obvious, bulging madness in his eyes.

"Now what's he up to?" I asked Mahmoud, relieved that he was gone.

"He will find Khaled, I think," Mahmoud replied.

"Damn, it's cold!" I spluttered.

"Yes. I am too cold, like you. I am all day dreaming that this cold will be gone."

"Mahmoud, you were in Bombay when we went to hear the Blind Singers, with Khaderbhai, weren't you?"

"Yes. It was the first meeting, for all of us, at the same time together. I saw you there the first time."

"I'm sorry. I didn't meet you that night, and I didn't notice you there. What I wanted to ask you is how you got together with Khaderbhai in the first place."

Mahmoud laughed. It was so rare to see him laugh out loud that I felt myself smiling in response. He'd lost weight on the mission - we'd all lost weight. His face was drawn tight to the high cheekbones and the pointed chin, covered with a thick, dark beard. His eyes, even in the cold moonlight, were the polished bronze of a temple vase.

"I am standing on the street, in Bombay, and I am doing some passport business with my friend. There is a hand on my shoulder.

It is Abdullah. He tells me that Khader Khan wants to see me. I go to Khader, in his car. We drive together, we talk, and after, I am his man."

"Why did he pick you? What made him pick you, and what made you agree to join him?"

Mahmoud frowned, and it seemed that he might be considering the question for the first time.

"I was against Pahlavi Shah," he began. "The secret police of the Shah, the Savak, they killed many people, and they put many people in the jail for beating. My father killed in the jail. My mother killed in the jail. For fighting against Shah. I was a small boy that time. When I grow up, I fight Shah. Two times in the jail. Two times beating, and electricity on my body, and too much pain. I fight for revolution in Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini makes the revolution in Iran, and he is the new power, when Shah runs away to America. But Savak secret police still the same. Now they work for Khomeini. Again I go in the jail. Again the beating and the electric pain. The same people from the Shah-the exactly same people in the jail-now they work for Khomeini. All my friends die in the jail, and in the war against Iraq. I escape, and come to Bombay. I make business, black-market business, with other Iran people. Then, Abdel Khader Khan makes me his man. In my life, I meet only one great man. That is Khader. Now, he is dead..."

He choked off the words, and rubbed a tear from each eye with the sleeve of his rough jacket.

It was a long speech, and we were freezing cold, yet still I would've asked him more. I wanted to know it all-everything that filled the gaps between what Khaderbhai had told me and the secrets Khaled had shared. But at that moment we heard a piercingly piteous scream of terror. It died suddenly, as if the thread of sound had been cut with a pair of shears. We looked at one another, and reached for weapons in the same instinct.

"This way!" Mahmoud shouted, running over the slippery snow and slush with short, careful steps.

We reached the origin of the sound at the same time as the other men. Nazeer and Suleiman rushed through our. group to see what we were staring at. They froze, silent and still, at the sight of Khaled Ansari kneeling over the body of Habib Abdur Rahman. The madman was on his back. He was dead. There was a knife in his throat where the words about luck had been only minutes before.

The knife had been pushed into his neck and twisted, just as Habib himself had done to our horses and to Siddiqi. But it wasn't Habib's knife that we stared at, jutting out of the muddy, sinewed throat like a branch from a riverbed. We all knew the knife well. We'd all seen its distinctive, carved, horn handle a hundred times. It was Khaled's knife.

Nazeer and Suleiman put their hands under Khaled's arms, and lifted him gently from the corpse. He accepted the help momentarily, but then he shrugged them off and knelt beside the body. Habib's pattu shawl was rucked up around his chest. Khaled pulled something from the front of the dead man's flak jacket. It was metal, two pieces of metal, hanging from Habib's neck on leather thongs. Jalalaad rushed forward and snatched them. They were the souvenir fragments of the tank that he and Hanif and Juma had destroyed; the pieces that his friends had worn around their necks.

Khaled stood and turned and walked slowly away from the killing.

I put my hand on his shoulder as he passed me, and walked with him. Behind me there was a howl of rage as Jalalaad attacked Habib's corpse with the butt of his Kalashnikov. I looked over my shoulder to see the mad eyes of the lunatic crushed beneath the rise and smashing fall of the weapon. And in one of those perversities of the pitying heart, I found myself feeling sorry for Habib. I'd wanted to kill him myself, more than once, and I knew that I was glad he was dead, but my heart was so sorry for him in that moment that I grieved as if he was a friend.
He
was a _teacher, I heard myself thinking. The most violent and dangerous man I'd ever known had been a kindergarten teacher. I couldn't shake that thought-as if it was the only truth, in that moment, that really mattered.

And when the men finally dragged Jalalaad away, there was nothing left: nothing but blood and snow and hair and shattered bone where the life and the tortured mind had been.

Khaled returned to our cave. He was muttering something in Arabic. His eyes were radiant, filled with a vision that illuminated him, and put an almost frightening resolve in the set of his scarred features.

At the cave, he removed the belt around his waist that held his canteen. He let it slip to the ground. He lifted the cartridge belt over his head from his shoulder and let that too fall. Next he rummaged through his pockets, emptying them of their contents one by one until there was nothing on him but the clothes he wore. At his feet were his false passports, his money, his letters, his wallet, his weapons, his jewellery, and even the bruised, wrinkle-eared photos of his long-dead family.

"What's he saying?" I asked Mahmoud desperately. I'd spent the last four weeks avoiding Khaled's eye and coldly rejecting his friendship. Suddenly, I was unbearably afraid that I was going to lose him; that I'd already lost him.

"It is the Koran," Mahmoud replied in a whisper. "He is telling Suras from the Koran."

Khaled left the cave and walked to the edge of the compound. I ran to stop him, and pushed him back with both hands. He allowed the shove, and then came on toward me again. I threw my arms around him and dragged him back a few paces. He didn't resist me.

He stared directly ahead at that infuriating vision only he could see while he chanted the hypnotically poetic verses of the Koran.

And when I let him go, he continued his walk out of the camp.

"Help me!" I shouted. "Can't you see? He's going! He's going out there!"

Mahmoud, Nazeer, and Suleiman came forward but, instead of helping me to restrain Khaled, they grasped my arms and gently prised them away from him. Khaled immediately began to walk forward. I wrestled myself free, and rushed to stop him again. I shouted at him and slapped at his face to waken him to the danger. He didn't resist and he didn't. react. I felt the tears hot on my cold face, stinging in the cracks that split my frozen lips. I felt the sobbing in my chest like a river rappling and rolling against worn and rounded rocks, on and on and on. I held him tight, with one arm around his neck and the other around his waist, my hands locked together at his back.

Nazeer, even as thin and weakened as he'd become in those weeks, was too strong for me. His steel hands grabbed at my wrists and peeled them away from Khaled. Mahmoud and Suleiman helped him to hold me back as I struggled and reached out to grab Khaled's jacket. And then we watched him walk from the camp into the winter that one way or another had ruined or killed us all.

"Didn't you see it?" Mahmoud asked me when he was gone. "Didn't you see his face?"

"Yes, I saw it, I saw it," I sobbed, staggering back to the cave to fall into the crumpled cell of my misery.

I lay there for hours unsleeping, filthy starving, angry, and broken-hearted. And I might've died there-some pain, sometimes, leaves you without legs or arms-but the smell of food brought me round. The men had decided that they couldn't wait to cook the last of the rotting meat. They'd boiled it in a pot during those hours, fanning the smoke away continuously and concealing the flame with blankets.

The soup was ready long before dawn, and every man took a bowl, glass, or mug of it. The stink of the rotting meat was more than our empty stomachs could bear, at first. We all vomited the foul, retching sips we took. But hunger has a will of its own, a will that's much older than the other will we praise and flatter in the palace of the mind. We were too hungry to refuse the food, and by the third try, or the fifth for some of us, we kept the repulsive, stinking brew down. Then the pain caused by the hot soup in our empty stomachs was as sharp as a belly full of fishhooks; yet that too passed, and every man forced himself to drink three helpings, and to chew the rubbery, rotting chunks of meat.

For two hours after that we took turns to dash into the rocks as the food worked through intestines and bowels that had seized in our starving bodies, and suddenly erupted.

At last, when we recovered, and when all the prayers were said, and when each man was ready, we gathered near the south-eastern edge of the compound at the place Habib had recommended for our attack. He'd assured us that the steep slope was our one chance to fight our way to freedom; and since he'd planned to fight in the attack with us, we had no reason to distrust the advice.

We were six men. The five others were Suleiman, Mahmoud Melbaaf, Nazeer, Jalalaad, and young Ala-ud-Din. He was a shy man of twenty with a boy's grin beneath an old man's faded green eyes.

He caught my eye, and nodded encouragingly. I returned the nod with a smile, and his face broke into a wider grin while his head nodded more vigorously. I looked away, ashamed that I'd spent so much time with him, months of hard time, without once trying to engage him in a conversation. We were going to die together, and I knew nothing about him. Nothing.

Dawn put fire in the sky. Wind-driven clouds streaming across the far plain were aflame, crimsoned with the first burning kisses of the morning sun. We shook hands, embraced, hugged one another, checked our weapons again and again, and stared down the steep slopes toward forever.

The end, when it comes, is always too soon. My skin was tight on my face, drawn back by the muscles of my neck and jaw, those muscles in turn pulled taut by the shoulders and arms and frostbitten hands, clutching the final agony of the gun.

Suleiman gave the order. My stomach dropped and locked, and froze as hard as the cold unfeeling earth beneath my boots. I stood up, and crossed the lip of the ridge. We started down the slope. It was a magnificent day, the best clear day for months. I remembered thinking, weeks before, that Afghanistan, like prison, had no dawns and no sunsets in the stone cages of its mountains.

Yet the dawn that morning was more lovely than any I'd ever known. When the steeper slopes eased into a more gradual decline, we picked up the pace, jogging over the last of the rose-pink snow and into the grey-green rough ground beyond.

The first explosions we heard were too far away from us to frighten me. Okay. Here it comes. This is it... The words chattered through my mind as if someone else spoke them: as if someone, like a coach, was preparing me for the end. Then the explosions were closer, as the enemy mortars found their range.